Tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to Amsterdam for the 4th annual Gallery developers conference. Last year in San Francisco was pretty great, and though the crowd will be a little smaller in Amsterdam, we should have a pretty good time! After that, San and I head to Paris for close to a week of tourism there, including seeing the end of the last stage of the Tour de France.

If you need to get in touch with me for any reason, just send me and email and I promise I'll go through each and every one when I get back! If something is urgent, send me an email and then send a text message to my cell phone. I should be able to receive those there, and I'll get in front of a computer if I need to.

As of the 2nd, I'm 24 now. It's not really any different than any other day, but this is the first birthday I've had after being done with school, having a real job, owning a house, etc, so thats kinda neat.

Some spoils:

• Shed from the parents for storing yard tools, etc
• Leatherman Skeletool from San
• LEGOs from San
• Daniel J. Boorstin Reader from parents
• Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock for Wii with 2 Guitars from Roger/Ben/Frank/Kurt/Me
• 5 Pizzas from San
• Something unknown in the mail from my brother. Will update here when it gets here -> Antitrust DVD and a book "Stuff White People Like"
• Entirely too many facebook wall, etc, posts from lots of people

I'll probably get me a Dell MD1000 for my hosting setup sometime in the next month or two, but that's not really birthday related.

Last weekend was spent in Destin, FL with San and some of her relatives. I took a few pictures and the good ones are here. These include some of my first fireworks pictures that aren't awful. The gorillapod worked out pretty well but next time, perhaps I'll remember my remote shutter release.

In 2 Weeks I'll be in Amsterdam for the 4th Galery Developer Conference, and then it's off to Paris. While I've been to both before, hanging out with Gallery people in Amsterdam will be a lot of fun, and I'm managing to squeeze in seeing the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris! Expect many pictures.

I had my last set of X-Rays yesterday and while it's very obvious where the break was, it's mostly healed and I can perhaps try some mountain biking again soon! I posted about my new road bike exactly a month ago, and in that month I've put 500 miles on it. Every morning during the week except Wednesdays I ride for ~2 hours, usually with a few other people, and on weekends I try to do ~3 hours twice. Sunday I rode out to Stone Mountain and did a lap around it before coming back, usually it's just a turnaround point, and in the mornings I've followed green arrows marked with "safari" (turned out to be ~25 mile tour to 8 parks with some hunting for the route at each one), gone on known routes such as the Outback Bikes Wednesday night ride route, and come up with a few of my own including one that is definitely going to be a regular route and put online somewhere. It's great to not be stuck inside on the trainer any more!

In related news, the Faster Mustache race team had our first organizational meeting last night. We're doing very well in lots of races: everything from 3rd place in an expert levels trials competition, to taking the vast majority of top 10 finishes in sport level mountain bike racing, to winning both our category and overall at a 24 hour mountain bike race in Conyers, GA. However, sponsorships have been very slow! If you'd like your name on our website, it only takes $25 and for $250 and up, you can have things like: your company linked to from our website, your logo on our jerseys, your logo on our tents and banners at races, etc! Please get in touch with me if you'd like to know more about sponsoring our team! Just email team@fastermustache.org! Every little bit helps because the team covers 50% of entry fees for people that commit to 10 races a season, and races cost between $20 and $100 a person to enter.

I've been participating at DP Challenge off and on for a while now, but my images have rarely finished in the top 50% of challenges. (here's my profile there) Photography is a very subjective thing and the end result of everyones votes can be surprising! I was fairly confident with my entry into the Bicycles II challenge:

but as voting went progressed, it swung around between 4.9 (more typical for me) to 6.8 (a possible first place!). Could I win for once? After the week of voting, I ended up in 15th place out of 135, which is in the top 10%! That works for me. I like first place and tenth place better than mine, but if it was up to me, I would have given myself third :)

Hopefully I'll start doing this more regularly, if only they'd offer and RSS feed of new challenges!

I take a lot of pictures. I figure I should post them on here. Here goes one. This is a HDR of the trees in my backyard:

(If you see a "used without permission" watermark on the image in your feed reader, please let me know in a comment or by email, so that I can add it to the list of allowed referrers!)

I just realized that my yahoo profile is now over 10 years old! I apparently created it on February 12, 1998, and while I know that I had AOL at home before that for perhaps around a year, I can't find any indication that they provide account creation dates anywhere in their system. (And back before AIM was properly integrated, I had to switch from ckdake to theckdake when we canceled AOL and didn't get to switch back to ckdake until perhaps college?)

Before AOL, I got online once or twice at a friends house, but I know my first experience online was at the 99X booth at some olympic experience thing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. They had a web browser, I typed in "games" in the address bar and alas, couldn't get to any games. Needless to say I didn't realize that the internet was good to have until later.

In 1999, I purchased my first domain name: ithought.org (for $70 a year or something stupid expensive from Network Solutions) and it's still the one I use for all my servers. ckdake.com finally showed up in 2004.

Things sure have come a long way in ~12 years!

It's been a little over a month since I broke my collarbone, things are slowly getting back to normal. I still haven't ridden a bike outside yet, but I've been on the trainer almost every day and when it's all said and done will have put in ~1000 miles on it. The first 30 days I been worked on my cadence and can do ~125RPMs for as long as I feel like it (on the lowest resistance setting on the trainer) and for the last few days (and next 20 or so) I'm cranking up the resistance and seeing how big I can make the sweat puddle. I'm thinking I should get a heart rate monitor to figure out how much work I'm actually doing. I'm back to using two hands to type pretty well but I'm still mousing with my left hand which is less weird than a month ago but still kinda weird, and it's still not a good idea for me to do things like open bags of chips. More X-Rays in a few weeks and we'll see how it's doing!

I also finally got around to taking some pictures of my house. I bought it in December but have been waiting for things to get a bit more moved in. Theres still no dining room table or bed, but I'm not going to be doing any heavy lifting soon so figure it was time to share some pictures of it as is. Nothing has broken yet, Greg has been awesome by coming over to mow since I'm busted, and thanks to my parents I have some trees and bushes planted in the back yard. If you're in the neighborhood and need to watch a HD movie or play some super smash brothers on a big TV, or have a beer on the back porch, just let me know!

In other news:

• My brother got married and is off to New Zealand for his honeymoon!
• San and I have our plane tickets and hotel reservations for this years Gallery Developer Conference, Amsterdam and Paris in July!
• They finally put no parking signs on my street on one side. Now it will be possible for things like the Garbage and UPS trucks to make it down the street since cars will only be on one side. Getting out of the driveway will be a lot easier too!

Yeah, I broke my collarbone this weekend. I'm going to the effort of typing this up here, so that when people want the whole story i don't have to laboriously type a shorter version on AIM or something.

Saturday morning I got up around 6:30 to head up to North Georgia with Christopher, Kurt, and a pack of people I didn't know. It was pretty overcast with a chance of rain, but we felt chance was in our favor. We met up in a Waffle House parking lot, and the caravan of ~6 cars full of bikes and bikers headed up to Ellijay, GA. As we got closer it started raining, and by the time we got to the trailhead, it was absolutely pouring. Usually, we don't ride in wet conditions because it damages the trails, but the day's ride consisted of gravel fire roads and rock trails with stream crossings, so we wouldn't really be doing any damage.

It took a while for everyone to get suited up, but we finally got going: fire roads and trails uphill for miles. Several of us, me included, thought the pace of the leaders was a bit fast for what was going to be a 4 hour ride, but we all stayed fairly close and I don't think anyone was going slower than they wanted too (and a few people had a race to compete in the next day). It was very wet and while we were completely soaked before we started, somehow we got even wetter. This was my first mountain ride in the rain, and while wet, it was actually pretty nice. On a sunny day, I'm usually pretty hesitant to go through mud or make a stream crossing, but once I'm gross, it's a lot easier to do those things without thinking about it.

Halfway up the elevation gain, there was a great view of the low clouds in the mountains, but unfortunately I left my cameraphone in the car due to the weather (and my weatherproof GPS does't have a camera). The 3 of us in the back told everyone else to go ahead, and we started up the second half of the climb about 5 minutes after them. And what a climb it was! See the profile below:

While going uphill was very hard, the downhill was actually worse. It was still raining, and that combined with the mud my front tire was throwing up made it very hard to see. The 3 of us were flying down a gravel road when I noticed that I was catching up to them. This seemed like a good thing, but it turned out that I was going way too fast. I barely saw the outline of a sharp right turn in front of me and as I started to brake, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stop or make the turn, and was faced with an easy decision: drop the bike or launch myself off a cliff. While both tires were locked up and skidding, i kicked my back wheel to the left and dropped my bike on the right side. It stopped me pretty quickly and hurt extremely bad. While just glad to not be off the cliff, this still wasn't fun. I could feel the scuff marks on my back from the gravel, but after sitting still for a few seconds to catch my breath, I realized my collarbone was broken. I gave it a good whack to try and align it properly while the adrenaline was in full force and before the pain or reality really set in, and we then started to worry about me going into shock.

Doh! We were on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods in the cold rain with no way to get out and no way to stay warm. Thankfully, a lost car pulled up a few minutes later. The guy I was with stashed my bike in the woods and the helpful family up there for some fishing helped me into their car. They were lost as well, but I pulled out my GPS and it gave us directions to the closest emergency room, the North Georgia Medical Center. Over an hour passed and we made it there. They dropped me off and went to fix a flat tire on their car and that's the last I saw of them. So there I was, alone in the ER, wearing spandex, soaking wet, and covered in dirt, without a wallet or phone. They took some x-rays, got my arm in a sling, and suggested I see an Orthopedic surgeon in the next few days, noting that it's a simple fracture that didn't separate. Not 20 minutes later, Kurt and Christopher picked me up at the ER after finishing their ride and we headed back to Atlanta.

After further inspection, the bite valve of my camelback is gone, and my helmet has a huge split in it, so it possibly saved my life. (Wear your helmets kids!) All in all, this is really annoying because I can't really ride for 2 months, it's hard to sleep, and really only being able to use my left hand is not fun, but it could have been a lot worse! While I missed out on the last 2/3 of the ride (which apparently is all awesome, technical, downhill with lots of stream crossings), I'm relatively well off with such a simple injury. Much worse could have happened if I hadn't been thinking, and of the very large number of my friends that have broken a bone biking, many of them needed surgery and metal plates or screws in their ankles, wrists, or collarbones. Health insurance is a good thing (16 pain pills were $3), and hopefully my bike will find it's way home! (I think the guy that hid it drove up the mountain to pick it up after he finished riding.)

So much thanks to everyone that helped, especially the many of you that I don't know. It's going to be quiet on here for a few weeks and I won't be e-mailing much, but I'll be back typing and riding as soon as possible!